Giles Coren loses it big time

The Times weekend restaurant reviewer, Giles Coren, has written a blistering e-mail to the paper's sub-editors. He accuses them of messing up one of his masterpieces. The e-mail has leaked out; you can read it here.

My first reaction to the e-mail is that if this is typical of Coren's first drafts, it's no surprise that the Times insists on running his submissions past sub-editors. Leaving aside the multiple obscenities, it's verbose (as even Giles admits at the end) and full of mis-spellings and grammatical errors. It's usually a good idea to count to ten after you write something in anger, but evidently Giles was too self-righteously mad to think of that.

And what is the substance of his complaint? Well, the sub omitted one word from the final sentence of the review. One letter, actually: the indefinite article. This got Giles incandescent with rage for two reasons. First, he claims that it means the piece ends on an unstressed syllable, something he would never do. I've read the sentence several times, and he's wrong about that: the word "nosh" is still stressed. Second, he says that it destroys his meaning: he had structured the whole review so as to get in a final joke playing on a double meaning for the Yiddish word "nosh". Apparently this word refers to eating not only in the conventional sense, but also in the sexual sense: blowjobs, hummers, what you will.

I don't know about you, but I don't read restaurant reviews, by Giles Coren or anyone else, looking for things like that. If the sub had left the indefinite article in place, I daresay the number of people who got this great joke would have been limited to the number of people who Giles personally told to look out for it. This is the Times, after all, not Viz. (Without questioning Giles's knowledge of Yiddish -- he seems very touchy about that -- I might point out that the late Lenny Bruce used "fress" rather than "nosh" for the sexual act. Lenny was at least as Jewish as Giles, and a whole lot funnier).

So where does this leave Giles, assuming he doesn't carry out on his implicit threat to walk away from the job? Well, as a restaurant reviewer who uses the column to expound on any subject that comes to mind, he's not a patch on A A Gill; as an egomaniac, he's not in Michael Winner's league; and as a writer, he's a shadow of his late father.